SOCIOL 89
Honors Seminars
Description: Seminar, three hours. Limited to 20 students. Designed as adjunct to lower-division lecture course. Exploration of topics in greater depth through supplemental readings, papers, or other activities and led by lecture course instructor. May be applied toward honors credit for eligible students. Honors content noted on transcript. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 0.0
Units: 0.0
2 of 2
AD
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2023 - The seminar requires you to read a research paper or other source material each week and then write a reflection memo for it. The memo is due the morning of the Sunday before your seminar class. This has sometimes led to late last minute reading and writing for this 1 unit seminar. Be better than me. That said, if you're not familiar with reading academic papers, it might take you a while to get through the papers and understanding them. Some of these academic papers took me 3+ hours getting through them. But that could just be me. Don't expect to get 100s easily from the memos. Professor Villarreal is very particular with the 100s he gives. So normally, the highest grade you'll get is 90. Don't worry if you don't get a 90 for each memo. I couldn't consistently get 90s but I still got an A. But sometimes, it got really stressful thinking about it, especially since the syllabus didn't include a numerical grade to alphabetical grading scale. As for the seminar part of the class, it didn't really feel like a seminar. Most of the time, it was Professor Villarreal sharing an overview of the reading of the week then him talking with the occasional student who voluntarily shares. Professor Villarreal does try to encourage people to share their memos and thoughts, but most of the time people talk because Villarreal mentions their memo. I think if seminar participation was part of the grade, then more people would be motivated to speak during the seminars. I think this seminar could meet its full seminar-potential if people spoke more and if there were sources that would help understand the readings if you weren't familiar with comprehending research papers.
Fall 2023 - The seminar requires you to read a research paper or other source material each week and then write a reflection memo for it. The memo is due the morning of the Sunday before your seminar class. This has sometimes led to late last minute reading and writing for this 1 unit seminar. Be better than me. That said, if you're not familiar with reading academic papers, it might take you a while to get through the papers and understanding them. Some of these academic papers took me 3+ hours getting through them. But that could just be me. Don't expect to get 100s easily from the memos. Professor Villarreal is very particular with the 100s he gives. So normally, the highest grade you'll get is 90. Don't worry if you don't get a 90 for each memo. I couldn't consistently get 90s but I still got an A. But sometimes, it got really stressful thinking about it, especially since the syllabus didn't include a numerical grade to alphabetical grading scale. As for the seminar part of the class, it didn't really feel like a seminar. Most of the time, it was Professor Villarreal sharing an overview of the reading of the week then him talking with the occasional student who voluntarily shares. Professor Villarreal does try to encourage people to share their memos and thoughts, but most of the time people talk because Villarreal mentions their memo. I think if seminar participation was part of the grade, then more people would be motivated to speak during the seminars. I think this seminar could meet its full seminar-potential if people spoke more and if there were sources that would help understand the readings if you weren't familiar with comprehending research papers.
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2022 - Nothing grand, though the class might be fun for anyone interested in sociology. The assignments were just weekly 1-page reflections on the assigned reading for the week - the reflections were graded, though I'm not 100% sure what the criteria was (the averages pretty much stabilized 90-95 by week 3). The readings were, for the most part, research papers related to the topic covered that week in SOCIOL 1. In terms of the actual class period, the professor would usually give a 30-minute talk related to the reading, then ask the class to discuss/give opinions on it. (There usually weren't many.) Notably, this class doesn't really feed back into SOCIOL 1 - it won't give you an advantage there, for instance. That being said, I thought the readings were pretty interesting - they were generally a mix of major past studies and a few of the professor's own papers, which I thought was cool.
Fall 2022 - Nothing grand, though the class might be fun for anyone interested in sociology. The assignments were just weekly 1-page reflections on the assigned reading for the week - the reflections were graded, though I'm not 100% sure what the criteria was (the averages pretty much stabilized 90-95 by week 3). The readings were, for the most part, research papers related to the topic covered that week in SOCIOL 1. In terms of the actual class period, the professor would usually give a 30-minute talk related to the reading, then ask the class to discuss/give opinions on it. (There usually weren't many.) Notably, this class doesn't really feed back into SOCIOL 1 - it won't give you an advantage there, for instance. That being said, I thought the readings were pretty interesting - they were generally a mix of major past studies and a few of the professor's own papers, which I thought was cool.
AD
2 of 2
